This invention generally relates to methods and apparatuses for measuring the rate of flow of a free flowing fluid, and more specifically to methods and apparatuses for measuring the rate of flow of effluents from an open discharge such as water flowing from an artesian well.
The impetus for the development of this invention was the set of problems associated with measuring the water yield from artesian wells. When drilling such wells with air drilling machines, the air blows the cuttings and any water the well produces out of the well. Periodically the drilling is stopped in order to measure the water yield and the effluent water is channeled into a single stream, typically through a short pipe. A bucket with a volume of several gallons and calibrated is then placed at the end of the pipe to receive the water. The length of time required to fill the bucket is measured with a stop watch. The flow rate of the water in gallons per minute is calculated by dividing the time registered on the stop watch into the capacity of the bucket and multiplying by a scale factor if necessary to adjust the dimensions of the result to gallons/minute.
The foregoing described procedure is simple but invariably a drilling crew will loose the stop watch, have no pencil and paper, or have no inclination to use them. This results in the time being approximated, the division being approximated and the flow rate being inaccurately determined.
Bucket size is also a problem. A one gallon bucket receiving water at a flow rate of 60 gallons per minute will be filled in one second. Even with a stop watch, human reaction times are too slow to obtain reasonable accuracy under such conditions, and therefore a much larger bucket must be used. With an electronic system used to measure time, bucket fill times of much less than a second can be accurately measured, and the size of the bucket used can be significantly reduced. Moreover, an electronic system can provide a degree of accuracy unobtainable by any manual techniques.
An electronic system can also provide the means for calculating the flow rate and displaying same so that the operator need not perform any calculations. Furthermore, since long term data storage is not a problem in a digital electronic system, flow rates from various measurements can be stored until it is convenient to record them with a pencil and paper.
No prior apparatus known to me provides the combination of attributes which are presented by and are inherently a part of this invention.